I think I am temperamentally a mystic. I feel very drawn to this form of experience and this mode of conceptualizing and, in particular, the deepening and layering of concepts with experience and experience with concepts that can be seen in mystical traditions. Skepticism is not an instinctual or default response for me. If someone tells me something, I am inclined to believe it, no matter how strange it sounds. Maybe I’m just gullible, particularly when it comes to profound experiences that I have never really had, or never had in the way that I would really like. Maybe I’m just a bad philosopher. The thought has certainly crossed my mind.

For example, I believe that Julian of Norwich had Showings, or revelations of Christ; that George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was carried up to heaven; that William Blake was visited by Angels in his dark little dwelling off the Strand in London; that Wordsworth had a total sensuous apprehension of the divine in nature during his ascent of Mount Snowdon; and that Philip K. Dick had an intellectual intuition of the divine in February 1974. This list could be continued. In fact, it could be nicely endless.

I don’t doubt these things, at least not at first, and I sometimes wonder whether I (as someone who teaches philosophy as a day job) should always be cultivating skepticism or praising the power of critical thinking. There is a defensive myopia to the obsession with critique, a refusal to see what you can’t make sense of, blocking the view of any strange new phenomenon with a misty drizzle of passive aggressive questions. At this point in history, it is at least arguable that understanding is as important as critique, and patient, kind-hearted, sympathetic observation more helpful than endless personal opinions, as we live in a world entirely saturated by suspicion and fueled by vicious judgments of each other. I’m not arguing for dogmatism, but I sometimes wonder whether philosophy’s obsession with critique risks becoming a form of obsessional self-protection against strange and novel forms of experience. My wish is to give leeway for strange new intensities of experience with which we can push back against the pressure of reality. All the way to ecstasy.

In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?”

But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of.

Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as public events pressed in on his imagination.

Popop, who came home to raise me after his release from Holmesburg Prison in ’88, would have never let a white man in a white coat lay a hand on the D, let alone the vas deferens, had he the context to differentiate between the two. He never mentioned any experiments either. If he had, he wouldn’t have seen the wanton use of his body as some epic reveal of treachery but another quotidian instance he might describe by way of an exasperated sigh, shrug, or “Duh, dickhead” hurled at some scholar with the “real” details, or social reformer come to reimagine us in their image, to correct our supposedly devious sexual habits before it was too late, which often meant well before our twelfth birthdays. Given the early onset encroachments of power, that old black adage on suspicion and physicians was never an abstraction at home.

I got snipped anyway.

And I was late, by any reasonable measure, thirty-two with too many kids climbing up my leg, three boys and one girl whose temperaments have long since broken and rebuilt me in their images, the first of whom arrived too soon after his mother stopped taking birth control and forgot to tell me. And I’ve never met people more averse to independent play. Shouts of “Daddy!” and “Dada!” puncture my every attempt to think, coming on as tickles or itty-bitty terrors between each typed word, and so I write this from two worlds at once, where promises of the near future—the local pool or doggie park, Rita’s Water Ice, the school track, the bike trail, or playing Diablo and Super Smash Bros.—defang the demands on my attention for ten or so minutes at a time. The interstices allow collective laughter over new word enunciations—a six-year-old’s “feastidious,” or a question of the utmost importance: Who taught the twins to say “Fresh to def?” My daughter, twelve, takes credit, and my oldest son, two years her senior, is above it all until we remind him how the ticklish remain so, even chin hair deep into puberty. It’s there, between the laughter and all my pleading—“Stop, no, don’t” and “Put that dog down!” and “Stop chokin each other!”—that I give myself over to thought, which is writing, and in this case or every case, correlated with what the children mean to me, and what I might mean to them, and what it meant to ensure that I might conceive children nevermore.

The doctor was quite brown, if that counts for anything in this context, and not one of those people whose entire personality is dedicated to the hatred of children, who seem to be multiplying on every blunt “side” of the political spectrum. Gentler than most lovers, he cupped my testicles and said that everything would be all right. And in this man’s supple embrace I drifted off into a blissful nondream of future agency.

The evening before the fourth annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in the north-central horse town of Ocala, I was in a buffet line at the VIP dinner, listening to a man describe his first encounter. “I was on an airboat near Turner River Road in the Glades and I saw it there,” he said. “At first, I confused it with a gator because it was hunched over, but then it stood up. It was probably eight feet tall. I could smell it too. I froze. It was like something had taken control over my body.” His story contained a common trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and fear in the face of a higher power.

I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.

It bears repeating: I believe in the existence of the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Wild Man, or, as it is called in South Florida, the Skunk Ape. There have been too many credible accounts and oral histories passed down over thousands of years to discount its/their existence. During my time working as a teacher on the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, I heard from students and elders very detailed and grave encounters with a large humanlike primate in the swamp. In the course of publishing Islandia Journal, a periodical of hidden local folklore and history, I also meet swamp enthusiasts—historians, hunters, hydrologists, et cetera—who describe encounters clearly. Though I’ve never had an encounter myself, I believe these stories intuitively, told by those who have nothing to gain from their telling. Unfortunately, no biological evidence supports the idea that Bigfoot exists. Attendees of the conference wax rhapsodically about what the future holds thanks to eDNA. The discovery of primate DNA in the water or dirt near an encounter location would rekindle the possibility of a biological Bigfoot, but for now, we’re waiting.

This absence of harder proof meant that the conference was, predictably, rife with speculation. At the VIP dinner, I sat next to Monica, one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance.  She was sunburnt and wore small round gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia with her partner, Joey, who told me later that she was just there to support Monica’s varying interests. While looking down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese around her styrofoam plate, Monica asked if I’d heard about the latest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch in the Utah desert. Talking about large objects under mesas and anomalies in the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we were at a Bigfoot conference, not storming Area 51. “It’s all connected,” she said, before explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes but rather because Bigfoot travels using interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You can either close your mind,” she told me, “or open it to the very real possibility of infinite dimensions.”

When I get dressed, I become a philosopher-king—not in the sense of presiding over utopia, but in the sense of trying to marry politics and intellect in the perfect imitation of God. Political considerations might include: destination, company, self-image, self-regard, in-group and out-group arrangements. The intellectual ones might involve: the weather, the way I am always too cold no matter the weather, the subway, the blisters on my feet, the laundry. When I get dressed, I have never once considered whether to add a belt. Belts have never struck me as a thing to “add”; pants either need a belt or they don’t. But some girls like to “add” one, and that’s fine too. I do consider the area where a belt might go—that stretch of midsection where the top of my pants meets the bottom of my shirt. It means a lot (to me), where exactly on my body that convergence takes place. If it’s lower, say a few inches below my belly button, I might get slouchier when I stand around, might remember being a kid in the early aughts, and I might in general feel more weighed down by the pull of gravity. If it’s higher up on my torso, I sit up straighter in my chair, I prefer a more substantial shoe, I feel more compact, more professional, more like my mother.

When I get dressed, I think about the last time I washed my hair and whether I’m going to wear my glasses or not. I am too much of a germophobe to wear shoes in the house, so I have no choice but to imagine the theoretical addition of a shoe, which I’ll put on last, when everything else is already a foregone conclusion. Lately, I can’t stop buying socks; it’s a compulsion. Wearing socks with no holes, that haven’t yet become limp from untold numbers of wash-and-dry cycles, has recently become crucial to my feeling of being able to face the world. On the other hand, I wear the same bra every single day, and it is such an essentially bland item of clothing that it feels like putting on my own skin. Nights are a different story: it’s important to invite spontaneity into your evening in whatever way you can.

When I get dressed I am confronted with the protean ecosystem of everything I have, everything I want, and why I have things that I’m not sure I want. Some things that I almost never buy, no matter their purported “quality,” are: dresses or skirts with slits, matching sets, sweaters with puffy shoulders, V-neck cardigans, Birkenstocks, tops where the pattern is printed only on the front and not the back, jeans that are ripped at the knees, and anything described as a “tunic.” I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy these things, I’m just telling you that I don’t want to. One thing I do want is to compose an ode to the tank top. The tank top is the shortest route to luxury—one of the only designer items affordable to those of us on a budget. A beautiful sweater or a handbag from wherever is out of the question, but you might, if it’s your birthday or you take an extra freelance gig, treat yourself to the flimsiest, paper-thinnest $200 tank top, knowing that the construction and the material is worth a fraction of that and feeling unreservedly that every dollar of difference is a delicious indecency. There’s nothing noble about being frivolous. But it can be wonderful to choose to be part of something bigger than you, which has a history and an artistry and—in the best case scenario—a point of view. It can even be worth an inordinate amount of your hard-won money. Anyways, when I get dressed, I reign over my little shelf of needlessly fancy tank tops and I feel alive.

There are some eternal quandaries. If I have to wear a sweater, a button-down shirt becomes untenable. (I don’t ever pop the collar neatly above my sweater, though I have nothing against prep, per se). If I have to wear tights, the prospect of choosing a skirt and a top and a sweater and socks and shoes becomes monstrous to me. If I choose to inflict tights upon myself, I will end up in a longer skirt so that I can avoid at least fifty percent of the lines that all those layers will generate on my body. I want to wear a pointed-toe kitten heel, but it feels impossible to do. If I have to wear a hat for warmth, I usually don’t.

Welcome to Today in Books, our round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are the biggest stories from the last week.

The New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century is Moving Units

I have gotten emails from booksellers and librarians (and regular book buyers and borrowers too) that The New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century list is bringing people into stores and libraries in a significant way. And I have seen quite a few social posts like this one that make me think this isn’t just a BR-audience effect. 

Well, now I have some data for you to back these reports up. According to Circana, the top 10 books on the list saw an average sales boost of 113% last week. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald saw a sales boost of more than 600%, likely as it was one of the most under-known books at the top of the list. Pretty impressive.

Kamala Harris Book Sales Soaring

A 60,000% increase in book sales means (at least) two things are true: enormous surge in interest and a low starting point. If Harris were selling 1000 copies a week, say, before Biden dropped out and she became the presumptive nominee, a 600x increase (60,000%) would mean 600,000 unit sales per week after. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that is not the rate she is selling at—probably something more like 100-200 copies a week before the surge. (Remember, most books don’t sell that many copies, especially ones that have been out for a while). 

The God of the Woods is the Book of the Summer

Yesterday, Erica wrote about the cluster of high-profile book clubs have picked Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods as one of their summer selections, and after reading it last week, I can see why. It is zippy, creepy, smart, with a real sense of place. A compelling cast of characters and enough red herrings to keep even the most experienced plot queens round out what is a total summer read package. And Hollywood has been paying attention, as The God of the Woods (and one her previous novels have been picked up for adaptation. Get on board and welcome to the woods. Hope you brought comfy shoes…and an alibi.

Here are the Book Riot pieces that resonated most with readers this week. Catch up (or reread) whatever catches your eye:

Books By and About Vice President Kamala Harris for Readers of All Ages

In 2021, Kamala Harris made history as our first Black and South Asian American Vice President. Prior to that, she was also the second Black woman (and first South Asian American) elected to the Senate. She’s now running for President. Harris is a reader and is the author of several books. Her favorite books have been covered previously here at Book Riot. They include Native Son by Richard Wright and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. The Kamala Harris books below give readers of all ages the opportunity to learn more about our Vice President.

Assemble a Crew: 8 “One Last Heist” Mystery and Thriller Books

While these books all contain the trope for one last heist they’re all different from each other and should hit many kinds of readers’ tastes. There’s a graphic novel with three generations of a family, a YA novel with a heist competition, a getaway driver pulling off a perfectly planned heist, a socialite and her drag queen crew, a romance/crime novel starring a con artist, a teen pulling off a heist to save her dad, a space heist novel with a species existence at stake, and a thriller with a past and present heist with a ticking clock!

The Best Book Club Book of the Summer

As the writer for our In the Club newsletter, which focuses on all things book clubs, I stay knee-deep in some book club shenanigans. And this summer, there seems to be one book in particular that’s making the book club rounds. 

Now, a little overlap in book choice among the online book clubs I follow is not necessarily unheard of—last year’s Book Club It Girls were Yellowface and Chain-Gang All-Stars—but this instance seems to be a little more than those, especially since this one book in particular is the book club selection for several book clubs at the same time.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

The 2024 TikTok Award Winners

Since the biggest TikTok books sell hundreds of thousands of copies, one could argue that the cash is the prize of being a BookTok favorite. But apparently you can get a trophy too, as Rebecca Yarros did after Fourth Wing was named International Book of the Year (yes it was a 2023 release, book awards we need to speed things up). A panel came up with the finalists for the 82,000 voters to revert to the mean. The most interesting categories to me were for breakthrough author and the two creator awards.

Lewis Lapham, Giant of 20th Century Journalism, Dies

For a long time, I didn’t realize Lapham was a) a real person and b) still alive and thriving while I was first reading Harper’s 20 years ago. The name had a mythic quality to me (like Mencken or Ellison or Woolf) that I couldn’t quite believe was of the modern moment. Harper’s own notice of his life and passing exceed anything I could write here, but I will offer this one quote as tribute: “I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.”

Why your local indie bookstore might not have Hillbilly Elegy in stock this week (or ever).

I do not envy the task of indie booksellers in moments like these. Where there is huge interest in a book (HarperCollins says more than 600,000 copies last week. Can that be right?!), but that book…well it sucks. On several levels. And yet, you have customers who want it and bills to pay. What do you do? The most common strategy seems to be to keep it off the shelves but take special orders. And I can understand why this feels a little better than having a stack of them ready to wrap. But is it all that different, really? Did one copy not find its way into the hands of a reader that it wouldn’t have? Are the dollars you forewent, crucial dollars as bestsellers are the bedrock on which most bookstores are built, really better for the world than JD Vance getting a couple of extra bucks (remember, a bookstore gets a bigger cut of the price of a book than the author does)? These aren’t rhetorical questions. I wonder about them mostly to help indie bookstores give themselves some grace in moments like these. Whatever strategy you choose probably feels compromised. And it probably is. And you are doing the best you can.

What is Going On With Book Sales?

On the most recent episode of First Edition, I am joined by Brenna Connor, Director & Industry Analyst for U.S. books sales for Circana. She has the goods: what is selling, what is trending, how retailers are doing, and much more. I learned a TON, and I bet you will too. I am tempted to drop some numbers here, but go listen and you can hear them. Curiosity gap, baby. You can find the episode here, or anywhere you get podcasts.

We made it everyone. It’s Friday. Enjoy it by checking out what we have on offer at Book Riot today:

The Best New Books Out in August, According to Indie Booksellers

Every month, the American Booksellers Association put together a list of the top 25 new book releases of the upcoming month as their Indie Next List Preview. These are books that were nominated by booksellers at independent bookstores across the country, and they cover all genres and categories. Each book has a quote from a bookseller about why they recommend this book, and these recommendations can be printed out as “shelf-talkers” to display in store.

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

Lately, the most-read books on Goodreads have stayed pretty similar from week to week. That’s why it’s surprising to see a new title in the #1 spot and a self-published book at that…

THE LORD OF THE RINGS Magic System, Explained

While The Lord of the Rings isn’t the first fantasy series in existence, it’s the archetype by which nearly all others since have been designed. Every epic fantasy since J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels set in Middle Earth has been influenced by or is outright trying to recapture the brilliance of those books.

The Ongoing Censorship of High School Advanced Placement Courses

The number of students taking AP tests has grown dramatically, especially in the last decade. This is in part due to readiness by students and in part because there are so many more subjects offered as part of the program. As of writing, there are 38 different AP subject areas ranging from art to language, science to math, literature to social sciences, history, and more. 

Yes, I’m still talking about the top books of the 21st century, and as I mentioned last week, I wanted to highlight some of the titles that would have been on my ballot. So here is another book from my list, and this pick is one of a couple horror titles that would be on my list.

Obviously, I read a lot of horror, but, y’all, I think it’s time we all recognize the impact that horror has on literature as a whole. We all know horror is booming right now. It’s no longer niche. It’s mainstream. And some of it is thanks to books like this one. In fact, you’ve probably heard about this one before, but if you haven’t read it yet, this is your sign.

These Friday Check Your Shelf newsletters are where I focus on book banning news, so there’s usually not much in terms of happy updates. This is especially true this week, as NBC recently published an article about one police officer’s two-year attempt to bring charges against school librarians in Granbury, Texas. I have more information linked in the newsletter, but this is such an unhinged story that it needs to be called out specifically. And as we see more legislative attempts to criminalize librarians, we’re going to see an increasing number of law enforcement figures trying to take book banning into their own hands.

Libraries & Librarians

News Updates

The FCC has approved the final rules to support WiFi hotspots through the E-Rate program, but a lawsuit has been filed to block the expansion.

“Austin City Council approved Thursday authorizing negotiations for an extended contract with the Travis County Sheriff’s Office to support security services at Austin Public Library branches.”

Book Adaptations in the News

The adaptation of Nickel Boys will open this year’s New York Film Festival.

Colin Firth joins the cast of Young Sherlock.

The new school year is just around the corner. Department stores are rolling out their school supplies, which are still hard for me to resist. The other day, my mom and I found a Corgi unicorn (Corgicorn?) school supplies set, and she said she had to buy it for me. So I guess I’m set then. I love notebooks, pens, and colorful tabs to take notes and annotate the books I’m reading. It helps me engage with the book’s content and remember what I’ve read.

Today, we’re delving into a couple must-read books for Disability Pride Month, new books, and bookish goods.

Bookish Goods

New Releases

Sesame Street premiered in 1969, the same year that my eldest sister, Kate, was born. The genre of children’s television was in its infancy; Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood had premiered just the previous year, joining Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody on the limited roster of shows meant for the very young, and the idea of using gimmicks from commercial TV—a variety of segments, a sense of humor—to support children’s development (not just to keep them quiet or sell them toys) was revolutionary. In 1969, the Sesame Street universe was inhabited by Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and Bert and Ernie—all Muppets—plus the humans Gordon and Susan, who were married to each other; Mr. Hooper, who ran the corner grocery; Bob—apparently, according to Wikipedia, a music teacher; and a rotating cast of kids, who seemed to have happily wandered in from the real world.

By the time I was born, in 1984, Sesame had grown. There were more Muppets, including the Count, Snuffy, Elmo, and my personal favorite, Grover, and more humans, including Luis, Maria, Linda, and Gina. There was merch: I took some early steps in Bert and Ernie slippers. And there were studies bearing out what the show’s creators had always claimed: watching Sesame Street could help little kids learn to read and count, improving their chances of success in school and potentially their entire lives. I watched Sesame Street every morning in my Bert and Ernie slippers and my jammies, sitting as still as I could in the rocking chair, hoping against hope that the cat would join me.

My mom had watched Sesame Street with both of my older sisters, and she liked watching it with me, too, which was no accident. The creators knew the value of co-viewing for children’s development, and they wrote the show to entertain parents as well as kids, with on-the-nose parodies of contemporary prime-time TV (among the most memorable, Miami Mice and Monsterpiece Theater), celebrity appearances (Judy Collins sang the alphabet with Snuffy; Jesse Jackson recited poetry on a stoop), and recurring sketches (who could forget Grover as the incompetent restaurant waiter?). Obviously, the Muppets, with their strangely expressive mouths and sophisticated sense of irony, were preferable to any cartoon, and particularly to the Disney-princess franchise—in which any human mom can recognize certain heteronormative toxins, of which my mom, child of one bad marriage, party to another, then finally and perhaps hesitantly in the one that would last, was perhaps even more acutely aware. She dressed all her daughters in overalls. One year she sewed me a cape like the one Grover wore to play Super Grover.

My first salaried job, in 2008, was at an uptight nonprofit run by an oil family in Washington, D.C. I disliked the job, which required me to wear nylons and organize policy “convenings,” the point of which I could not see, and I hated D.C., where irony seemed to have been smothered by earnest, middlebrow ambition. I wanted to move to New York, and I often took the bus up for the weekend. Coming back one Sunday, in the middle of Union Station, I saw an exhibition about Sesame Workshop: it, too, was a nonprofit, which I now considered my area of expertise; surely it wouldn’t require nylons; and it occurred to me that I should try to get a job there. After a couple of tries, I did. It was 2010, and I was twenty-six years old.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Patty Nash’s poem “Metropolitan” appears in the new Summer issue of the Review, no. 248.

Do you have photos of different drafts of this poem?

I do not write in “drafts.” I just continue to write or tinker on the same poem until I can’t anymore. This means that it is hard to see earlier iterations of the poem—the earliest one I have access to is one that I sent to my friends, so it was somewhat presentable already. There are small line differences, however, and sometimes major ones. For example, I changed the gender of the protagonist in this section—here is a screenshot of an earlier version:

I also slimmed down the ending, thank goodness. Earlier version here as well:

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

This car was an unwieldy inheritance. It wasn’t needed, wasn’t wanted, and wasn’t even paid off. The FJ Cruiser had been the prized possession and long-standing project of my uncle Andrzej: an elevator repairman who lived in Passaic, New Jersey, until he died suddenly of an air embolism. It was a freak accident: a minuscule air bubble traveled from his IV to his lungs while he was lying in the hospital with a stomach ulcer. This uncommonly gentle man died a uniquely terrifying death: gasping for air that filled his lungs but couldn’t reach his bloodstream. A nurse found him crumpled on the bathroom floor, purple in the face, eyes wide open.

This car had been his desideratum incarnate. Before he even purchased it, he got a scale model the size of a kitten, with functional doors, windows, headlights. Boyishly he showed it to us, his teenage nephews, when he came over to our house. Once he bought the car he drove it mostly shirtless, wearing sunglasses, drinking Red Bull. He affixed the metal company sticker of his employer—Standard Elevator—to a spot on the central console. Long after he died, the pleasant, neutral scent of his body odor remained in the car, despite my brother’s attempts to dispel it with various kinds of air fresheners. I always thought this smell matched the car’s aesthetic: a campy machismo, cartoonishly buff, dense without being hefty or overbearing. This was a car that knew what a silly shape it cut on the highway—and liked it. Driving it, you would wave to other drivers of other FJ Cruisers, some of whom would even wave back.

Anthe (ಅಂತೆ) is one of my favorite words in the Kannada language. Somewhat meaningless by itself, it adds so much nuance and emotion when appended to a sentence that we Kannadigas cannot carry on a conversation without using it. Depending on the context and the speaker’s tone, anthe can convey an expression of surprise or the understanding that gossip is being shared. It could mean “so it happened,” “that’s how it is,” “apparently,” or “it seems.” The latter comes closest to a direct translation, but is a frustratingly simple choice. Anthe will only ever half-heartedly migrate to English.

Banu Mushtaq, whose short stories I have been translating recently, and whose “Red Lungi” appears in the Summer 2024 issue of The Paris Review, employs anthe generously. Mushtaq’s characters use anthe when reporting something someone said verbatim or when guessing how something might have happened. In another instance, she uses echo words with anthe, another common characteristic of the Kannada language: one character utters anthe-kanthe to refer to hearsay. There are also a whole lot of ellipses in Mushtaq’s stories … her sentences often trail off … like so … She mixes up her tenses here and there. It is always deliberate, this nod to the idea that time is not linear. The awareness that we inhabit different time zones and dimensions and live in stories within stories is commonplace in India. These narrative tools give Mushtaq’s work a sense of orality, as if she is sitting across from you and telling you the story.

Whenever Mushtaq and I do talk in real life, she is narrating, she is reporting, she is discussing the oppressive political scene in India, she is going back to her youth, laughing about that one time there was a fatwa issued against her for a story—they wanted her to stop writing, she told them to go to hell—she is constantly relaying anecdotes and thinking out loud and living through stories. There is more anthe in her urgency to convey everything all at once than I can hope to store in my notes.

My favorite function of the word is how its repetition in every other sentence, each differently intoned, allows a musicality to slip into daily speech. It gives everyday Kannada its impu, or melody.

My father and O. J. Simpson were passing ships in red Corvettes in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Circa 1977, the sunroofs of their nearly identical luxury cars open for maximum exposure, they would wave to one another like carnival jesters, my sister in the back seat squeamish at the irony, their white wives occupying the front seats in a Siamese dream, twin stars in the fantasy no one is aware of until it arrives in images. Such gestures were the requisite scenic signifiers for that era of post–New Negro black entertainers faced with the hedonism of psychedelia, blaxploitation, and the amphetamined economy of the Reagan years. They were transitioning from taboos to tabloids to well-adjusted, literal tokens, having made it to some sense of after all or ever after in a fairy tale blurring the wasteland upheld by the lucky-bland amusements of almost-suburbanites. Unkempt and illicit ambitions were their freedom and retribution.

My father earned his living writing love songs that were ventriloquized by pop stars and peers such as Ray Charles; he agonized over the banality of spectacle in lyrics that rendered the banal uplifting. O. J. cradled footballs and ran very fast when chased, bowlegged, baffled at his own momentum. He accrued enough of it to become the first black athlete to garner corporate endorsements from companies like Hertz. He’d open in the typical format of vintage commercials, by reciting semi-didactic pleasantries as adspeak. Then he’d embody his embargoed alter ego, his own personal starship and space shuttle, and ramp up to cinematic sprinting through an airport terminal, wearing a three-piece suit and landing in a hideous car that made the Corvette with the top down seem like an inaccessible yearning, all while maintaining the plastic smile of a catalogue model. O. J.’s sad and vaguely distracted gaze revealed a self-deprecating narcissism contracted during the transition from being bullied as a child to outrunning everyone and every limitation he’d ever known. This was before it was acknowledged that the cerebrum of football players and boxers are often severely damaged and inflamed by the time they retire—and likely throughout their careers—in ways that can trigger bouts of rage, dementia, confusion, memory lapse, erratic dissociation. The talent, the miracle of divine intervention, that grants them access to white America’s lifestyle, in turn holds them hostage in pathologized exceptionalism. This makes it easier to understand the fatigued and dejected glaze over O. J.’s gaze as a mask dressing a festering internal wound.

My father’s gaze was similar, confident but strained and distant, almost plaintive. He’d spent some years as a welterweight boxer, which may or may not have contributed to his struggle with bipolar disorder and the constancy of lithium prescriptions of varying strengths—pharmaceutical cocktails, which, in addition to tempering his mood swings, siphoned the vigor from him, bending his will toward a docility more unnerving than rage. O. J’s double consciousness remained slicker and more protected; he made his icy sublimated anger into his signature charm even as it remained in part involuntary. As I write this, O. J.’s remains are being cremated in Las Vegas, and scientists have requested the opportunity to examine his brain for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The Simpson family is refusing. O. J. himself was convinced that he did suffer a level of chronic swelling consistent with the condition and severe enough to compromise his cognition and memory. There is no logical way to deny his intuition about this, considering the length of his career (he spent eleven years in the NFL and was a collegiate player before that) and the minimal number of blows to the head required to trigger a lifetime of chronic swelling. While considering O. J. and my father as twin victims of their own ambitions, I wonder how many blows to the skull, how many subtle fractures my father endured, and would I want to look inside and see the tissues ballooning for myself, would I allow doctors to dissect his brain for proof or defer to suspicion and leave space for the sacred/sacrosanct black-and-blank mystery of our destiny? I can’t be sure.